All good writing begins with terrible first efforts.
(Anne Lamott)

Really Warm Springs

Two nights near Warm Springs during a December heat wave. Hiking in shorts (shorts!). Fulfilling our geeky need for history tourism. Lovely trip all around. This whole wedging a getaway between finals week and Christmas week is inspired.

Just outside of Warm Springs you can tour the FDR Little White House Historic Site, where you can see his specially adapted, hand-controlled cars, watch a decent 14-minute film (narrated by Walter Cronkite, natch), view the famous "Unfinished Portrait" and walk through the room where he died.

And when you're all done you can ask yourself, "Hey, wasn't Lucy Mercer with him when he died?" Oops, guess they forgot to mention that. Ah, history. To be fair, the museum is really great; lots of artifacts that contextualize FDR's experiences at Warm Springs as well as broader issues related to his presidency. Apparently people sent him a lot of canes as gifts; there were four separate cabinets of canes. And gavels; lots of ceremonial gavels. And hey, look who I came across in the exhibit room!

That Migrant Mother, she really gets around.

We also did a decent, hilly hike in FDR State Park. According to the thermometer on my day pack, it was 72 degrees. I wore shorts. On December 19th. The hike started and ended with views like this:

The view outside our accommodations was almost as good, and came with a bonus -- this little visitor:

She played hard to get, scampering away when we opened the door to greet her, then settling within a safe three-to-four feet of us on the porch. She preferred our only neighbors at the place, a couple who wrongly decided she was a stray and fed her. This was no stray; just a smart kitty exploiting the kindness of strangers. When she wasn't eating their food she could be found outside our door, on our welcome mat, staring through the glass with large yellow eyes.

FDR State Park was built, surprise surprise, by the CCC. Here's one of those CCC "boys," memorialized in bronze:

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